Annotations From A Roseraie
by Serendipity1
Summary: A collection of drabbles and ficlets on varying characters and subjects. Ratings range from PG to R.
1. Losing The Flower

**_'Losing The Flower"_**

"But when will I know?" he asks into the blue silence that stretches itself around the narrow bed frame. He has been awake too long, his eyes have smudged, bruised circles of crushed-violet purple underneath them, his skin is paler in the moonlight than it looks in the soft, smudged light of the day through the curtains. He looks frighteningly transparent, fragile and hollow as an empty eggshell, and she wants to grasp his hand for proof that he is still here with her. If she looks closely, she thinks the moonlight may shine through him.

She offers him the glass of water in lieu of a reply.

He takes it with a shaky hand, and she watches as he tries to drink. Thin trails of water trickle down the corner of his mouth and trace the contours of his jawbone and neck, slip down and wet his pajama collar. The glass is heavy for him, and when he places it back on the counter it wobbles and falls, spilling water over the carpet on the floor. She doesn't bother to lean down and pick it up, and he shivers and draws the white sheets around his body, pulls his old and battered stuffed animals near him so they are nestled around his face, bowed over his head. His arms are folded.

"When will I know when I'm dying?" he asks.

Her response is muffled in a sob and an old sweater.


	2. Cobwebs

**_'Cobwebs'_**

No one noticed the spiders in Ohtori.

They'd see the repetitive design of the roses, they'd notice the immense and towering school buildings, perhaps make a comment or two about how very tall that tower of the Chairman's was and if it was really quite necessary to have it so. The Duelists, of course, would notice just a bit more than the average student.

Touga, for instance, would notice how the Rose Garden was shaped and designed to look like a large, intricate birdcage. Saionji made his own tea when he'd been in possession of the Bride, as the tea she'd made had been bitter, with a faint aftertaste of something dusty and stale and sweet. Tasted like the scent of decaying perfume. Nanami had noticed how threatening and long the shadows from the forest would look, how they seemed to reach out for people and swallow them whole. She'd dismissed it as a silly fear, of course, but it was still very true. Miki had realized once that the afternoons in Ohtori seemed to curl out and stretch on, while the little hours of the morning and evening would snap by quickly. The watch timed the minutes, and he was surprised to see that they were all accurate, all told of a perfectly normal and ordered day. Of course, one could never trust the clocks in Ohtori, but how was he to know? And Juri, naturally, was too focused inward to truly concentrate on the_ outward_, but even she noticed how the endless curving stairs of the Arena never made one tired or out of breath.

All little things, enough to crawl in the edge of the mind and huddle just out of sight, enough to lend a strange sort of paranoia to the thoughts, enough to make the vague hint that something, _something_ was very wrong. Still, the spiders came and went, spinning webs through the kendo room, in lockers, in windowsills and dark corners of the school. Webs were thick in the bushes of the Rose Garden, interlaced between the thorns and stems and pale, velvet petals of the roses. Silver-white lace threaded in and out of every bush, and the spiders hung tapestries on the higher parts of the ceiling. No one saw, no one noticed, no one commented, and why would they? Spiders were common.

They wouldn't understand how the weaving of a web was so remarkably, so conveniently similar to the weaving of a spell. Couldn't understand how well the silk of spider webs held the magic in. Anthy would smile her witch's smile as she knitted and wove and moved among the minds of the billions of insects in Ohtori, directing them, leading them as she reworked her masterpiece.

And Utena would never ask why, every night, Anthy would weave a small mat of pale white and silver embroidery thread while they had their tea.


	3. Recipe for Darkness

**_"Recipe For Darkness" _**

To make a black rose…well, the creation was so much more complicated than the simple planting and tending of the average duel rose. Those were colored by the purest resonating hue, the color that most represented a duelist's cause. But that was only one facet of a personality, and a black rose, a true black rose, required more. This one, for instance, required a single base flower, one rose to hold the spell. This was a blank, pure white bloom, petals full and unmarked. Stark and austere in comparison to the pure creamy white of the Victor's rose, this rose was one that had not yet found an owner.

With a word and a gesture from the Witch, the rose found roots in the water, keeping it steady as the spell wove gently around it, lead it towards its owner, its holder, and tied the bonds between Soul and Representation.

The waters Changed, glowed and shone with the light of a soul. Water, already a living thing, could easily be a vessel for the life of a human.

Through the stem of the rose came the spirit; every part of the person, but backwards. From light to dark, from the vague surface thoughts, to morals, to the very deepest corners of the soul. Layers and layers of self were absorbed, melting through the petals and into the very heart of the flower, and with each layer, the color darkened and deepened before turning to final, purest black. Like dipping candles, like making a pearl…or a poisoned apple. The soul seeped in the rose, to be placed back into the body inside-out. To make a black rose was such an involved matter.

It was lucky that she had such experience.


	4. Up and Onward

**_'Up And Onward' _**

She is following a path that stretches from skyline to skyline. It stretches, precarious, over ravines and depths of still, dark water. It is lined with shards of glass, and though she slices her feet when she walks, she moves on regardless. There are no other travelers on this road. It is meant for only her. She climbs upwards towards the infinite sky, towards a future so intangible and changeable she can only think of it in a series of hopes and images, leaving pieces of herself all along the jagged slopes. It is a pilgrimage of the soul, and she is her own sacrifice.


	5. Circuit

**_"Circuit"_**

She never liked the roses. She never cared for the roses. They were there, they existed, they represented and personified. They were tools, nothing more, nothing less. Though she appreciated their meaning. As centuries passed, she amused herself with this little spell, this proof of the oddities of the human mind. Because they could not be stretched into her mold, they could not experience the entirety of their world. Because they placed limits and boundaries upon the world, they couldn't fully comprehend what they were doing. But they knew just enough, and they placed the meanings, the feelings, the truth and the lies into small things. So from vials to blood and bone and clay, urns to birds, and all the way down to flowers she passed. A little gift from the Victorians. So it moved, century upon century, although there were constants. She was always garbed in red.

Ohtori was a mirror, and what it reflected was a dreamscape of hopes and fears. She was the Rose Bride, and she would tend her flowers quietly.

Until the time came for them to be discarded.


	6. Hovering On The Edge

**_'Hovering On The Edge'_**

Utena feels the time slipping by in a waterfall of crystal grains through the neck of the largest hourglass in the world. She can feel the edge of the swell of something too colossal for her to even comprehend, great and bloated and dark as the middle of a thunderstorm.

As she sips her tea and eats her cookies with Anthy, as she discusses life past graduation, (_as if there was any hope for it to begin with_), she can almost sense the world hurtling through a distance very far away and very close, poised on the edge of destruction. She can almost hear the sound of everything shattering broken and hollow and echoing, leaving only fragments to show that it ever existed.

Utena can feel herself racing towards the end of a world, and knows too late that she might not be ready for it.


	7. Changing The Tunes

**_'Changing The Tunes'_**

_Once upon a life time ago, in a forever far away from here…_

He used to read fairy tales to his sister. No, when he pauses to recollect, he realizes his sister read fairy tales to him. Or rather, she told the stories and he would read them. She never told them correctly, always straying from the stories as they unfolded on the paper. He used to tell her that she couldn't keep changing the stories, even if she didn't like the way they went. That all seems years and miles away from him here, even in this same garden they read those books in.

It's aged along with him, tumbled with long grasses gone to seed. The flower bed is overrun with weeds, arching over the trellises with proprietary arrogance. The trees have changed little: to him they were always enormous. They curve protectively, or possessively, or aggressively over the garden like a mother would over an infant…or perhaps a snake over prey. And there is something wrong, because mathematically speaking, the dimensions make little sense. The trees are too large and the space between them seems a little like a deep chasm, although it is flat, grass-covered ground. How can a path cast shadow on the trees?

His sister is standing in a white dress in the lane, playing on a bright red piano and smiling. His sister is four years old, and he knows instinctively that he is as well, although he is also acutely aware that he is thirteen and so should she be, in an ordered and logical universe. He knows he is dreaming as well, and wishes his subconscious had allowed him the comforting weight of a stopwatch in his hand. The song she plays is haunting and lilting, but it too is changed from what it had been, and suddenly he is seated by her on the black leather piano bench, pumping his hands on the keys and unable to touch them and reorder her music into a more pleasing tune. She's laughing at him, Kozue is, pearly white baby teeth flashing at him and her eyes wickedly amused.

"You have to ask the wolf to teach you, big brother," she tells him, and the music is getting more intense, "Because only the wolf knows how to play this song." Her voice is a far away whisper beneath the pounding of the keys. When he tells her he doesn't want to learn the song, he wants to make it stop, she smiles and tells him the song never ends or changes.

And he can't change a fact just because he doesn't like its existence.


	8. Watermarks in Dreams

**_"Watermarks in Dreams" _**

She noticed how high and vaulted these buildings were, as though the sides of a mighty birdcage, enclosing everyone who lived and worked within it. The school gave off a feeling of great space and altering dimensions, and if she wasn't of the practical mindset that it was simply her mind playing tricks on her due to stress, she would have sworn that it moved.

On her first day there, after unpacking her pictures, clothes she took from him, shoes she inherited from an aunt, and everything of a past life as a girl and a present life as what she wanted to be, she lay down on the soft down of her bedding and watched the ceiling. Shadows played like children in and out of the light fixture and the furniture, chasing each other as light shifted somewhere outside the thin, watery pane of glass of her window. That night, she woke up in the little hours of the morning, the sky still a washed-charcoal grey, and saw the girl sitting on her desk chair. Her skin was corpse-pale and her hair was short, the color of crushed violets. She was watching her through dark eyes that spoke of secrets and hidden jokes. When the girl smiled, she closed her eyes and fell back into dreams.

At night, she haunted her dreams as a faceless, flitting presence. She tied torn ribbons in her hair and mocked her false beliefs, smiling sweetly as she did so. Rain was constantly falling; puddles spread out and wet the ground beneath their bare feet. The girl was wet from head to toe, her sodden gown trailing behind her in long trails of blended water and cloth. She would discard it like it was trash and stand naked before her, a mocking smile on her face as she caressed her hair. The buildings in her dreams were closer, always coming closer once she turned her face away, and she felt as though they were forming a face, and a mouth. She couldn't ever move.

The last night, she followed her down a closed, dark hallway, watching her flicker in and out of sight as she moved through trails of light. The hall was lined with half-finished paintings, and the rain that was always present dripped upon them and made them bleed. When she came to the end of the hall, the girl turned and smiled at her. Two little girls lay on the floor, but one was dead and the other, golden-haired and pigtailed, coughed up a stream of water before she began to breathe.

_"She fell in first, and the prince saved her. I wanted to be saved too, but he couldn't save me because she killed him. No one even knew there were two little girls. I came here, where the dead can live. Now you will stay here, too."_

And when she awoke, her tears tasted like bitter rainwater.


	9. First Steps

**'First Steps'**

"It's skin cream," she said, applying it in measured circles to her face. "I was told it was a new line of cosmetic, but the idea of adding crushed pearls is hardly new. The Chinese came up with it originally."

Utena watched her in the mirror that covered half the wall. It had been meant for self-viewing during practice, but at the moment it was doubling as an enormous compact mirror for Juri. The range of cosmetics confused and intimidated her a little, as did the way they could transform Juri's face from beautiful to stunning. The glossy magazine picture she'd seen made her look colder and more distant, and yet very mature. Sometimes she felt like she was swimming in a sea of sophisticates.

The foil resting on her knees as she pressed herself into the folding chair felt very heavy. She wondered if this had been a good idea or not. "Um…I'm glad you agreed to this, _sempai_. It's been a little obvious now that I needed more practice, especially after Touga…well."

Juri gave her a brief, perfunctory glance before turning back to the mirror without a response, and the words died in her throat. Silence stretched until her stomach clenched and she stood up, clumsy and awkward and unsure of what to say. "Thanks again, anyway. Bye."

She was halfway to the door before the answering "You're welcome" hit her like a tidal wave of _maybe_.


	10. Replacement

**'Replacement'**

She curls up like a cat when they're finished with each other, and she isn't one for pillow talk, although she does try to converse during the act. Unlike her brother, there is no posturing, no stretching, and no dramatics with the bed as a stage. She clings to him, blindly trustful, as though she is seeing someone else in him, someone who could support her like he knows Touga is not. It hurts him sometimes when he sees the same look in her eyes that she used to give to her brother used on him. He doesn't know why.


	11. La Petite Mort

**"La Petite Mort"**

Death was not like an orgasm. She knew this, although she'd had precious little of both. Death was supposed to be a one-time occurrence, and it was almost as barred for her as the rush of pleasure that signified the end of sex. 'A little death' was the agonizing stroke of a razor's edge against bone, the shivery-sweet agony of blades sliding beneath the skin and through the muscle. Small deaths of the senses, of the heart, of the soul. Small deaths that she caused, the violation of the mind and body. Immortality came with endless, intimate funerals.

An orgasm was a blinding, all-consuming pulse that erased eternity in the span of a second. If this was the sensation she had to look forward to when the breath left her body, the temptation of a brutal fall or a quiet and peaceful slip of the hand over a cup of tea was more powerful and inviting than the luster of the apple in Eden. She could not forsake her duty or her prince. She'd forfeited the right to release.

Therefore, death could be nothing like an orgasm.


	12. Sighting

**Sighting"**

Once, when she was walking to classes, she thought she might have seen it, large, red and as flashy as a neon sign, parked in front of the rose garden. A boy was leaning against its passenger door, dressed in a white student council's jacket, his fingers caressing the side of a car as if it was a person and he was about to get in bed with it._ What a weird comparison_, she thought, and looked away. When she looked back after a second there was no car and the boy was inside the greenhouse. Somehow, that didn't even seem strange.


	13. Insight

**"Insight"**

Her swordsmanship was like a ballad, strong, bold, and capturing. She moved fluidly, the rippling of her dress and the whirling strands of her hair emphasizing her graceful movements. Sparks flew when her weapon struck the Prince's sword; metal whined and screamed as swords intercrossed. If she was a ballad, Utena was an amateur's aria, searing and forceful, if lacking in skill. Only the strength that Dios _(dios what an odd name is he a god or is he a)_ lent to her made her a formidable opponent, but her desire burned in every move she made. A slash, a flurry of petals, and it was through. Both roses collapsed upon themselves and fell to the floor in a shower. She did not mind.

"My objective was not intangible," she said, through the haze of memories, false and true, hers and not hers. The girl was staring at her shatter-shocked, and she could feel that confusion and hesitance from the voice that sang from her. And all through that, laced and shot through to her very soul, the abstract made real: the concept of Prince. "The knight climbed up the glass hill and slid down. That's what comes of climbing glass," she said to her, "You're not the one in the gold."

She left her with her sword and her witch-queen, the petals withering on the floor.


	14. He Draws Near

**Title**: He Draws Near  
**Characters**: Utena, Akio  
**Word Count**: 131  
**Rating**: PG

She wonders why he's always there when she wants him to be. She wonders why she can say his name, either in longing or in fear and need for safety, or in interest, or in any kind of tone possible, and he will appear as if pulled forcibly from the woodwork by the sound of her voice. She wonders why he's also so close the way not even her friends are, and if her parents would have been the same, always just a whisper away, and never out of arm's reach. She wonders why she doesn't want to think of him as a parent.

She's wondered almost everything, but she never has considered to think about why he's always so close by. She does not know about predators.


	15. In The Stars

**Title**: In The Stars  
**Characters**: Saionji and Akio  
**Rating**: Totally G.  
**Notes**: A blatant poke at Akio's little planetarium and his fondness for bringing celestial bodies into everything. Humorous. 135 words.

"Ah, Saionji. Do have a seat. I've received your letter, and although I respect several of the views you expressed within it, I must disagree with the decision overall. I'm sorry, but the time is not yet right for you to rejoin the council. It's simply impossible, considering the circumstances."

"Which are?"

A faint clicking sound, and the ceiling overhead filled with an accurate replica of the solar system. "The planets, Saionji. Are you fully aware of the impact that these celestial bodies have on your life? Not only is Neptune currently out of balance, but the moons of Jupiter are not in proper alignment. And the business with Pluto may set everything back at least a month."

"…"

"However, it's probable that you will meet a tall, dark, handsome stranger today. Isn't that pleasant?"


	16. Placing Pieces

**Title**: Placing Pieces  
**Characters**: Nanami  
**Rating**: G  
**Notes**: Written because of a thought I had while watching the episode where we flashback to Touga's birthday party. Nanami and her mother. 241 words.

Her mother smells like powder, like fragrant perfume and flowery soap. In the morning, her hands are soft and delicate, running through her hair, applying the smooth stick of lipstick to perfectly shaped lips. Her mother's clothes are pressed and clean, pale colors and slippery, silky fabrics. Her mother's voice is never loud or gently whispered, but cool and precise.

When mother smiles or laughs or plays, it is with her brother. Mother is different when it is only with her, her daughter. When her arms open and hold her she is stiff as a porcelain-jointed doll, her words recorded and repeated every day, at waking, and every night as she tucks her in the large bed with oak posts and blankets that she can swim in. She runs manicured fingers through her hair and smiles at her, only once, and the light clicks off with the feeling of an interrupted dream. Ungiven kisses hover in the air.

She decides one day to be clean also, to be soft and smooth, cool as marble-stone. She decides she will be like her mother in every way, blonde hair up and tamed, laced and ribboned and elegant. When she is beautiful, a mirror replica, her mother will hold her like she holds her brother. Nanami repeats her recited words of love as she sits in front of her mother's dressing room table, lipstick in her hands, and pieces together their unfinished family puzzle.


End file.
